Tupac gridlock d movie#
Gridlock’d doesn’t have the imaginative vision of a movie like Trainspotting, yet it’s more literally true to the haphazard torpor of the junkie life than anything we’ve seen on screen since Drugstore Cowboy. Desperate to get into rehab, they’re tossed from one ugly fluorescent-lit government office to the next, a comedy of urban errors that escalates in insanity when the police mistake them for killers.
As Gridlock’d goes on, the two have run-ins with cops, drug dealers, gangsters, and a welfare bureaucracy so rusty and sclerotic you’d call it Kafkaesque were there any real design to it.
Written and directed by Vondie Curtis Hall, the movie, set in the squalid backstreets of Detroit, is a vibrantly gritty lower-depths comedy, a tale of hapless junkie thieves, played by Shakur and Tim Roth, who bum around the city like a couple of alley cats, torn between their desire to score and their desperation to kick. But Gridlock’d, which he completed two months before his death in a still-unsolved shooting incident last September, proves that he had the dynamism and flair of a major screen actor. But that’s about it.We’ll never know if Tupac Shakur could have been a movie star. In another scene there is some amusement to be had out of Spoon’s asking Stretch to stab him with a pen knife so that they can go to the hospital for treatment. “I’m your boss.” But one can’t be quite sure that the humor (mild as it is) of this anger, coming from a perpetually hard-up junkie who presumably pays no taxes and is seeking to receive benefits from those who do, is even intended. My tax dollars are paying your f***ing wages!” he cries out. There is one scene in which Tim Roth bursts out with a tirade against the arrogance of little office holders in the language of lower middle class white angst: “This f***ing country’s falling apart,” he says, and especially in the case of “these people who have government jobs. But even if you are a fan of the poetry of unrestraint and inarticulacy even if you find a weird beauty in sentences in which every third word is one that an ever-diminishing number of uptight honkies consider obscenities, you may well find little to like here. I suppose there must be people, like Suze in SubUrbia, who consider it time well spent to listen to such stuff, so long as they can watch cool, attractive people being cool and attractive at the same time. “The concept of time has us all f***ed,” we are told, or “Life is a traffic jam.” “Poet,” you understand meaning not a person who writes poetry but one who is most generously endowed with attitude.There is some poetry it is true-a few inarticulate banalities chanted to a jazzy background on keyboard and bass with cigarette obligato. The rap enters into the picture only at the end, though all the way through the idea of both Spoon, Tupac’s character, and Cookie being “poets” is made much of. This leads me to believe that the film is supposed to be a comedy, but the prevailing humor is not of the yuk yuk kind but of the melancholic, fashionable, ghetto-cool kind which is obviously designed to showcase Tupac as movie star as well as rapper. There is also a blind man with a dog called Nixon who flips out in the welfare offcie. They have many jolly adventures dodging these two and the police at the same time they are battling the bureaucracy to get into rehab. The director himself plays Mr Big, one D Repper, and his henchman is played by Tom Towles. At the same time the two buddies, called Stretch (Roth) and Spoon (Shakur) are on the run from a couple of bad dudes trying to kill them. They take the girl, Cookie, to the hospital and encounter the first of many roadblocks put in their way by bureaucrats and paper pushers. the habit) after Tupac’s girlfriend, played by Thandie Newton, overdoses one New Year’s Eve. They play a couple of junkie musicians in Detroit vaguely trying to “kick” (i.e. Gridlock’d is yet another attitude film, this one by Vondie Curtis Hall and starring the late Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth.
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